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A new shoe manufacturing process using a 3-D footprint called selective laser sintering (SLS) is about to be introduced and according to the manufacturers will be used to custom design soccer boots. Prior 2 Lever is a London based company which have developed soft wear to laser scan the player's feet to make a digital model of the foot . Using a PEDAR force recording insole system the client carries out a series of exercises wearing and a template is produced for the sole with a stud arrangement specific to the wearer's requirements. The CAD shoes system was developed by University College London researcher Siavash Mahdavi and manufacturer claims include the CAM/CAD soccer boots will help to reduce injury. Potentially CAM/CAD shoes could be a giant step forward for shoe making and help considerably to reduce the problem of ill fitting shoes. This has great potential for shoes customization for people with specific fit requirements such as those suffering insensate feet (peripheral neuropathy) CAM/CAD insoles have been around for a decade but extension to shoe and boot manufacture repesents an innovative development .

A new shoe manufacturing process using a 3-D footprint called selective laser sintering (SLS) is about to be introduced and according to the manufacturers will be used to custom design soccer boots. Prior 2 Lever is a London based company which have developed soft wear to laser scan the player's feet to make a digital model of the foot . Using a PEDAR force recording insole system the client carries out a series of exercises wearing and a template is produced for the sole with a stud arrangement specific to the wearer's requirements. The CAD shoes system was developed by University College London researcher Siavash Mahdavi and manufacturer claims include the CAM/CAD soccer boots will help to reduce injury. Potentially CAM/CAD shoes could be a giant step forward for shoe making and help considerably to reduce the problem of ill fitting shoes. This has great potential for shoes customization for people with specific fit requirements such as those suffering insensate feet (peripheral neuropathy) CAM/CAD insoles have been around for a decade but extension to shoe and boot manufacture repesents an innovative development .

I toured Nike's huge research and development facility last year in Beaverton, Oregon while attending the Gait and Clinical Movement Analysis Society's annual meeting. The Nike researchers demonstrated a laser scanner that they use to produce custom fit lasts for the shoes of the professional athletes they sponsor. So this technology has been in use for some time but not at the consumer level, to my knowledge. I would imagine that this process will be very costly to produce custom athletic shoes, especially considering the short life span of some of these shoes for the professional and amateur athlete.

How much would a custom athletic shoe cost?? It's probably much cheaper over the long run (with as good, if not better, functionality) to get a good kangaroo skin soccer boot and then fit it with a custom foot orthosis, like I do currently for my soccer player patients. Then when the boot wears out, the orthosis can be moved to the new boot, at probably a fraction of the cost of a custom-fit boot.

I worked for a Northampton based company back in 1995 called footscan. We used 3d optical scanning to make orthopaedic footwear. But we also made some custom football boots for a couple of international footballers of the day (one had huge pes pancakus feet). So this kind of technology is definately not new. One of the problems we ran into was that while you can cut a last, and by linking the CAD/CAM software, cut a pattern for the upper in virtually any shape you want, actually pulling the upper over the last to make a good looking shoe is not always so simple. Moreover, with specific reference to the football boots, we had difficulty in obtaining a suitably sized and shaped cleat plate. I suspect in order to bring cost down, the system described by Cameron will be a "best-fit" library.

Of other note, back then we had problems scanning black skin as it absorbed the lasers rather than reflected so we had to use white stockings. Also we scanned semi-weightbearing- lots of problems with this when making orthopaedic footwear. Finally, I did within-day and between-day error studies- not good results . Lets hope the system has come on a bit since then.

Would be nice if someone could invent a boot that stopped met stress fractures- funny how the prevelence of those seems to correlate with the increased technology going into the boots.